ABSTRACT
Bion’s original presentation of his ideas on memory and desire, given on 16 June 1965 at a Scientific Meeting of the British Psychoanalytical Society, was not published at the time because he gave it without notes, apologizing to his audience at the beginning and undertaking to provide a written version at some point. He said that if he had written down at that stage what he wanted to say about the two terms of the title that were the subject of his paper, he felt it would have made little sense. He preferred to speak it before expressing it in written language. In 1967 he published the bare bones of the paper as a two-page article, “Notes on Memory and Desire”, in the Psychoanalytic Forum; it was reprinted in Melanie Klein Today, Volume 2: Mainly Practice (1988), edited by Elizabeth Spillius, and was also appended at the end of the 1994 edition of Bion’s Cogitations. When Bion presented that cut-down, gnomic account, several analysts took part in the discussion of it, but only Bion’s responses were published at the time. It is notable that in response to questions concerning the role of one of the terms he addresses in the paper, memory, Bion made a distinction between the kind of memory that interferes with analytic receptivity and a different kind, more akin to a suddenly recalled dream, which “swims into view”. For this phenomenon Bion preferred the term evolution.
